Impressionism and Surrealism in Multiparticle Dynamics

Peter Carruthers, the scientist, was a man of remarkable mathematical and physical culture. He had also something which is less common now a days, namely a profound physical intuition which guided him to approach in an original way the most interesting problems at a given moment and in this way he became a guide also for others. Multiparticle dynamics being by definition a many-body problem, it has to use methods specific for many body-physics. A physicist like Peter Carruthers, who had brought important and well known contributions to solid state physics, was therefore best qualified to enter the rapidly developping field of multiparticle dynamics. It is however less known that he was the first one to postulate the existence of a new state of quark matter, which he called “quarkium” and which he assumed to be a “bizarre Fermi liquid”[1]. Note that this was three years before the now accepted concept of deconfined quark matter was proposed. Two of the methods used in many-body physics are of particular importance for multiparticle dynamics, hydrodynamics and quantum statistics and Pete brought lasting contributions to both of these. His scientific achievements would certainly have been even more numerous, hadn’t he have to spend much of his time in the seventies and eighties with administrative duties. (He was the founding director of the theory division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and later chairman of the Physics Department of the University of Arizona.)